I am almost done with my Welsh and my Vikings. I only need now to put on a coat of matt varnish to finish them. Unfortunately, I need to wait until the weather warms up and the rains subside. Perhaps by then I may come to prefer their sheen.

While I wait for the weather to change, I have to organize the the parts to my row houses that I laser-cut a few weeks ago. The task is to take a pile of parts and organize them into baggies of parts for my friends to then assemble.

Update: Done. Nine houses with only 3 sets of the same missing part, which, luckily, is optional for construction.

Yesterday I learned that even if your Java class serializes via java.io.Externalizable, so giving the class complete control over the marshaling and unmarshaling of the data, you must still defined a serialVersionUID or Java will create one for you. As methods signatures are included in the calculation of serialVersionUID my newly added method caused the creation of a different version id and so, unexpectedly, the marshaled data on the wire was incompatible. To fix the problem I just needed to define serialVersionUID to be the calculated version prior to my addition of the method. Luckily, the log contained the version number I needed!

During the week I prepared the bases with sand glued and mounded around the figure's base. I then painted it. I first made the mistake of preparing with black and then painting with a too dark a green. God, they looked awful. So I asked Chris who is very talented with color for help and she picked out, from the colors I had on hand, Vallejo's 70.605 German Red Brown as a base color and Citadel's Elysian Green for the grass.

The brown was dabbed on with the side of the brush so as to leave some of the prior dark color. Then she dabbed on green in a few areas, again, with the side of the brush. Where there was too much green she dabbed on the brown very lightly. I really like the result.

Also on the workbench are some very small, rough cottages for my son's medieval castle diorama. We will see how far a little spackle, paint, and dried grass stalks will take us!

I enjoy listening to The Moth, I highly recommended to all feeling people, except that I often become glum afterwards as I have no exciting stories to tell. Software development contains no stories worth retelling.